Podcast: Tiny sea creature and a new medical adhesive

For more precise reconstruction of compound fractures and shattered bones, a team of bioengineers have looked to Mother Nature for an alternative to metal hardware. Russell Stewart and colleagues of the University of Utah have duplicated a natural glue secreted by a tiny sea creature called the sandcastle worm. The hope is to fix small bones broken in battlefield injuries, car crashes and other accidents.

Here is Dr. Stewart explaining how the sandcastle worm uses the glue to construct its underwater home: “In the wild they glue together sand grains, sea shells and whatever sort of mineral particles they can get a hold of. They use these tentacles to gather those particles, and they bring them in towards their mouth. If they like the size and the texture and the shape, they’ll put a couple of little tiny dabs of glue on it and press it on to the end of the tube… Our interest is in studying that natural adhesive and understanding what it’s made out of, how it works and then copying that with synthetic polymers that we hope to use as medical adhesives.”

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Watch a narrated video of the sandcastle worm building a home in a lab using bits of silicon.

Still the adhesive has passed initial toxicity studies in cell cultures, and its strength exceeds that of Super Glue. For a more colorful description of the glue’s grabbing power, here’s Dr. Stewart again: “On a 1 square centimeter bond we can hang a 40-pound bag of potatoes… It might already be adequate for repairing bones that are in non-loadbearing situations, particularly the cranial facial bones.”